Potentially, but not the only reason of inconsistency.
Ghost Likes (Anti-Spam): X’s algorithm flagged the liker as "suspicious." The user sees the red heart on their screen, but the backend invalidated the vote immediately to prevent botting.
Private Likes Sync Bug: Since likes became private, the notification system (which sees the action) and the public counter (which displays it) frequently fail to sync.
Aggressive Caching: The distributed system is lagging; the notification is real time, but the public metric is serving an old version of the data.